


He Gets By On You

by Ferritin4



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Platonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 21:00:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5430641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferritin4/pseuds/Ferritin4
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Really, Peril,” Napoleon said, “it’s not fair to call them wolves when you’re the one with the real pearly whites, is it?” And he winked and went out the cell door, and Illya knew what was coming when it opened again.</p><p>--</p><p>It was the betrayal, he thought, that made it seem like they were a family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Gets By On You

**Author's Note:**

> [What, a song lyric title? Yes. Yes, because I couldn't help myself and therefore this is as you can clearly see a line from Rush's "Tom Sawyer". That's it. That's the joke.]

Napoleon had a way with words. Gaby had a way with with trust, a way of making her eyes beg for mercy. She got her mercy and she used it, and Napoleon got a word in edgewise and he used it all up. They were like diamonds, the two of them. They were like fireflies, but not fragile. They were iron on the inside, and it was the iron, Illya thought, that made them into spies. Illya was iron, too, and that was about all he had in common with either of them. It was his bravery that made it seem like they were all equals. 

Illya had a few good words in Russian, but trust had had its way with him too many times. Illya, Illya had his bravery and his two hands, and they were bloody, bloody things.

The blood his heart was smeared across Russia, spread over the map like a stain, and he could never earn back what had been lost to duplicity. He could never have his mother by his side; his father was lost.

It was the betrayal, he thought, that made it seem like they were a family.

 

* * *

 

Napoleon had improved his communication skills, if not his technology, and he could at least be counted on to let Illya know when he was planning to throw him to the wolves.

“Really, Peril,” Napoleon said, “it’s not fair to call them wolves when you’re the one with the real pearly whites, is it?” And he winked and went out the cell door, and Illya knew what was coming when it opened again.

Men, who thought Napoleon had given him up for a trip out of this prison. Poachers, who had fallen into money laundering for the wrong people.

Lambs, to the slaughter.

 

* * *

 

Gaby had betrayed him a dozen times. Communication was unnecessary. Illya had stopped trying to see it coming and just started working on his sprint.

 

* * *

 

Gaby toasted him when he made it back from the poachers’ prison, put a glass into his left hand as he walked in the door.

“Thank you,” Illya said, and put it down.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Of course,” he replied. “Where’s Solo?”

“In the bedroom.” She had taken her shoes off already. Her feet were tiny and silent on the carpet. She was like a rabbit, like the bunny he’d had as a pet when he was a child, dark and distant and soft and secretly very angry.

Secretly angry, he thought, was one other thing they all had in common.

“Solo!” Illya shouted. “Did you get —”

“Darling,” Solo said from behind the mahogany door. “No need to shout.”

“Not your darling,” Illya retorted, “ _darling_. Did you get the pictures, or not?”

“Of course he got the pictures,” Gaby said as Solo emerged.

“Yes, of course I got the pictures.” His tie was off, though he shoes were on; he had a drink in his hand. This was a comfortable place, this room Illya had walked into, and he would just as soon walk right back out.

“Well, I made a short stop at their private printer,” Illya said, holding up his camera, “and now maybe we have a few more pictures to look at.”

“Brilliant,” Napoleon said. “We’ll work on it in the morning,” and Illya took his cue and took his camera and went into his own room to start working.

 

* * *

 

Illya could see the way Gaby’s brows canted in when he asked Solo things she knew; he could see the stiffness in Napoleon’s spine when Illya closed the bedroom door behind him.

“Now,” Napoleon said, in that way he had, with that look in his eye, with that turn to his mouth, when he opened the door an hour later and threatened all of Illya’s work on the negatives.

Illya pushed the door shut until it was only cracked.

“Yes?” he said.

“Is this about the guards? Because I looked them all over in  _detail_  and Peril, I promise, I knew you could handle yourself.”

“I’m fine,” Illya said. “Go back to your drink.”

“I’m done drinking,” Solo marveled to himself, as though this was a novel concept.

“Then go back to whatever it is you do when you’re not drinking.”

“Would it help if I said I was sorry?”

“No,” Illya told him. “I’m fine, Cowboy. No reason to sober up for me.”

“Well,” Napoleon said, in that way he had, with that look in his eye. “In that case.”

 

* * *

 

Gaby always apologized, probably because she kept surprising him. Napoleon clearly felt less compunction to repent. He tended to skip it.

“Well, that was lively,” Solo said into the radio when Illya made it up the stairs onto the upper deck. “Gaby, that was very quick thinking of you, but you know I think we all work a little better with some warning, don’t you? Maybe a little ‘how-do-you-do, I’m going to sell Kuryakin here wholesale for a meeting with the marquis, why don’t you be a good fellow and bring an extra gun for him’?”

“Yes,” Illya said into the radio, leaning over Solo to get to the receiver. “Maybe something like that.”

“I’m  _sorry_ ,” Gaby’s voice hissed, staticky. “I didn’t exactly have the time!”

 

* * *

 

She never had time. Solo always had time. It didn’t matter either way. Illya was smart enough to know when to run and fit enough to make it every time.

 

* * *

 

“I’m sorry,” she said again, contrite, when the mission was over. 

“It’s fine,” he said. “I would have done exactly the same thing.”

At some point they had figured out he was lying, but she still let him say it. Maybe that was why Napoleon didn’t make the effort to apologize: for all his debonair affectations, Solo hated platitudes when someone else was saying them.

 

* * *

 

He hated them when Illya said them, anyway.

 

* * *

 

“Well,” Napoleon said, in that way he had when they were really fucked, “we find ourselves in a difficult place.”

Gaby snorted. She was practically bristling; Illya wanted to pet her until she calmed down, like a dog.

“Mm,” Illya said. They were waiting to be shot by Nazis. The Nazis certainly had said,  _we will be back to shoot you one by one if the disk doesn’t have the names_ , and the disk definitely did not have any names, and the Nazis did have guns that looked like they worked.

They were in a difficult place.

“How are we going to get them to believe that we don’t know the disk is useless?” Gaby said sharply. 

“We’ll have a talk with them,” Solo said. “Maybe they’ll believe we had no idea.” His shrugs were a work of art even when he cared: his expressions always looked the same on the outside.

On the inside, he was frightened. Gaby was, too.

“We can figure this out,” Illya said. “As a team.”

“Don’t get polite on me now, Kuryakin,” Solo snapped. Scared and angry, and maybe the first more than the second

Illya was more angry than scared, but that was never gone.

“Maybe we convince them only one of us knows it’s a fake,” Illya said.

“What good would that do?” Gaby hissed.

“It’s going to distract them a little,” Illya said. “And maybe I can get them to take me out of cell before they try to shoot me, and that can be even more distracting.” He clenched his jaw and relaxed it. He stretched his fingers out along his thighs and tried to control the twitch of his muscles.

Illya was always angry, but when he was about to die, he was fucking furious.

“And where are we going to go?” Gaby said. “This place is a maze.”

“No, no,” Napoleon said, “Peril has a point, they’re excitable, and there’s a staircase —” and Illya knew he had won.

“They’re coming back,” Illya interrupted. Heavy footsteps rattled on the metal floors above them.

He was going to fight, of course. There were ten of them here and easily another fifteen guarding the halls. Illya believed Gaby and Solo had a chance.

Two out of three was… it was better than nothing.

Illya was fucking livid.

“Well, Peril,” Solo said, as though he was going to be fixing Illya a drink tonight. “See you on the other side.”

“Try to get my body home,” Illya said, because now, now he could agree with Napoleon for once in his life, and now was no time for platitudes.

Napoleon’s mouth opened silently, only just a crack.

“What?!” Gaby said.

“They’re going to shoot me,” Illya said. He smiled, just a little, and met her eyes. “They promised, and there’s a lot of them to keep promises.”

“You can’t do this,” she said, aghast, and Napoleon said, “A  _distraction_ , Kuryakin, is a  _loud noise_ , not —”

“Trust me, it’s going to make very loud noise,” Illya said quickly. “And I don’t think we have lot of choice! Did you bring secret gun? No? Okay. My plan then.”

“I never took you for a fatalist,” Solo said, and, oh, he was angry now.

“I’m Russian,” Illya told him coolly. “We start learning in grade school.”

 

* * *

 

The Nazis were almost as angry about the disk as Illya was about dying. They were not hard to convince.

They took him out of the cell and marched him up the stairs, the main staircase, not the side one Gaby and Solo were going to take to get the hell out of this building and out of Illya’s rapidly shortening life. Illya saw Napoleon filch something out of the pocket of one the Nazis through the bars of the cell, and he knew they would figure this one out between them. As a team.

 

* * *

 

He wondered if Gaby would say  _I’m sorry_  at his funeral. He would end up having one whether they got his body back or not. The Americans were painfully sentimental, and both Solo and Gaby had looked like they would need to do something about Illya’s death.

It wouldn’t matter: he would be dead, and it wouldn’t have been their idea, for once.

He wondered, as they marched him into the main office and stood him by the computer with the fake disk, if Napoleon would say  _Well_  during his eulogy, in that way he had, when he wanted to look like he had all the answers.

 _Well_ , Illya imagined him saying.  _I’d like to say he was a good man, a sweet, gentle, kind man, but I think most of the people here have met him at least once._  And people would smile where they sat with their hands folded, whoever was there, a bunch of Americans and British and Germans and Illya’s commanding officer, who would above all people approve of humor at a funeral.

“What is this?” the German colonel barked, holding up the disk. “What is this shit?”

Illya blinked.

“It’s a decoy,” he said in German. “What do you think, you stupid —”

It was a test. Illya had two hands with blood soaked so deep in the skin the stain would never come out, and when he was angry he did foolish things.

It was a test, and when the German colonel put down the tape and slapped him, Illya knew he was safe.

 

* * *

 

Safe was a very relative term. The Nazis were convinced, with a lot of help from Illya, that he could be traded for a disk with the  _real_  names, as though something like that even existed. They kept him in seclusion for three weeks before they abandoned the building and burned it down. All of Illya’s furious thoughts, all of his  _come and get my fucking body already_ were lost in the fire.

They wouldn’t be coming back to get him anyway. They never did; who could? Nobody had the time, in this business.

 

* * *

 

Illya’s break came as an act of God. The guards left him in the thin-walled cell to go to church the Sunday after they got settled into their new home. They thought three and a half weeks on gruel could weaken Illya enough to make him safe to leave alone.

Safe was a very relative term.

 

* * *

 

He was in Austria when he walked out of the woods and into a village. He was wearing gray canvas trousers and a torn gray shirt and he had no money. He was huge and he was strange and he didn’t have Gaby’s way with trust, so he asked around until someone would point him to the nearest farm, and he dropped his eyes to the ground and used all his manners and got a job.

 

* * *

 

Payday was two weeks later, and then Illya could get a train ticket to London and make a phone call. 

His new clothes felt like silk on his skin. He was clean for the first time in over a month. He had brushed his hair.

“Hello?” said a British voice Illya didn’t recognize. Illya gave him the password, then the next man, and the next.

“Hello?” Waverley said finally. “Who’s this?”

“Kuryakin,” Illya said, and Waverley was, for once, silent. 

Illya let it go on for a few seconds. Waverley took a single breath and recovered himself.

“Oh, fantastic news,” he said brightly. “Wonderful! Wonderful, and your timing really couldn’t be better. The memorial is today, don’t you know?”

“Put it off for a long time,” Illya said. He didn’t know what he’d thought Waverley would say, but not this.

“Well, you know, they were convinced you must be alive,” Waverley said. “Which, as a matter of fact, was true, I might point out, and then they wanted to find your bones in that bloody burnt-down factory, but there weren’t any two-meter skeletons in the rubble.”

“So they gave up?” Illya said. He would have given up on himself in two days. It was flattering.

“Yes, it was very tragic, loads of tears. Solo’s giving the eulogy this evening, I expect it will be touching to the extreme. Now, do you think I should tell them you’re not dead? I think, you know, there are both pros and cons to consider.”

“Pros and cons,” Illya repeated.

“Perhaps we should make a list. Pro column: relief of agony, avoidance of terrible grief. On the other hand, they’ve been grieving for weeks, so we’re not really avoiding more than another, what, six hours? How soon can you be here, Kuryakin?”

“By train? Longer than that,” Illya said. “By plane, faster.”

“Cracking! I’ll get a plane sent over right away. Where are you, anyway?”

“Vienna.”

“Brilliant. And then where were we?”

“‘On the other hand’,” Illya said helpfully. “Con.”

“Yes, yes, con. Con the second, they’ll probably cancel it if they know you’re alive, and we’ve already ordered the catering, the flowers, the whole shebang, as our American compatriots like to say.” Waverley paused.

“Well,” Illya offered. “Don’t like to waste food.”

“No,” Waverley said, and then he was quiet again.

Illya smoothed his shirtfront and waited. This was already in the running for the strangest conversation he had ever —

“The, ah, the menu’s quite nice, Illya,” Waverley said suddenly, and his voice was soft in a way Illya had never heard, like he was talking to — to family. To a child. “I… I really think you might like to try it.”

“All right,” Illya said, fighting the feeling in his chest. “I’ll be there.”

 

* * *

 

He was there in three hours, which gave him time to get a haircut and a shave and change into one of his own suits, and then he went downstairs to the American embassy to attend his own funeral.

 

* * *

 

There were no pictures of him posted in tasteful frames, thank the KGB’s unending commitment to information control. Illya’s name, even, was nowhere to be found: the entrance to the non-denominational but highly Christianized hall of worship was marked only with a wreath of white roses.

People were already sitting down. Gaby was in a chair front and center, Solo beside her and no one on either side of them. Her earrings glittered in the low light. Illya could see Waverley’s profile as he turned to talk to Illya’s commanding officer in the first row, and then Solo stood, walked up to the podium, and cleared his throat.

Illya took a step back into the shadow of the entryway.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Solo said. He licked his lips and looked down. “Well.”

There was nothing familiar about it. It hurt Illya’s stomach to watch, the way the dark red of Solo’s lips blanched and went soft, the way that his eyes wouldn’t look up again.

This was  _wrong_. This was —

Gaby made a noise, wet and hurt, and Illya felt like the asshole of the year.

“Well,” Napoleon said again, as though this was at all normal, as though any of this was all right, as though he planned to get through this  _like this_ , like  _this_. Fuck, no. Illya pushed off of the wall as fast as he could.

“I would like to say something nice about Illya,” Napoleon continued, unbelievably, staring at the surface of the podium, “but everything I liked best about him was classified, so I’ll just say —”

“Hello,” Illya said, halfway up the aisle, and Napoleon finally looked up.

 

* * *

 

Spies were calm people, even in extraordinary circumstances. No one shouted, not until Illya reached the podium and leaned over and said, “Thank you for coming. The service is ending a little short, but I hear the food is good.”

Napoleon stayed uncharacteristically silent, but Gaby went with character all the way and launched herself at Illya, yelling enough for all of them.

 

* * *

 

She calmed down and stopped hitting him after two minutes, and then she just wrapped her arms around his waist and cried into his suit jacket. Illya brought his hand up to cradle her head and tucked her under his other arm and quit trying to feel like anything was normal.

Napoleon was still silent. Illya looked down at Gaby’s head and blinked, hard. He was an idiot; he wasn’t angry, for once.

People were filing out. Waverley met Illya’s eyes over the crowd, and his face was — nothing was normal.

Napoleon stayed quiet until everyone had left, quiet until Gaby’s tears had died down to soft sniffling noises.

“Good timing,” Napoleon said roughly. Illya looked up at him. He wanted to look away; he didn’t belong here. Napoleon was — he wasn’t crying. There were no tears on his face, not yet. 

“I hate you,” Gaby mumbled into Illya’s shirt. She had wormed her way under his jacket as well as his arm.

Illya didn’t belong here, not like this, not with them both. He was coming apart from the inside out; he held Gaby tighter.

“I’m sorry,” Illya said. “I came as fast as I can.”

Napoleon smiled a real smile, his eyes dancing, as though there were still no tears on his face.

“No, it’s all right,” he said. “I would have done exactly the same thing.”

 

* * *

 

 

“That,” Illya barked at Gaby, “was a  _terrible_  plan. Why don’t you just say you know I’m there to kidnap him, then he can send his stupid —”

“No,” Gaby cut him off. “No.” She scrambled down a ladder, and Illya dropped down after her.

“You can’t be serious,” Illya said. There were fucking attack dogs tailing them; this was not the time for sentimentality.

He could come back. He always came back, he was used to it —

“I’m not sending you to them,” Gaby said fiercely.

“I agree,” Napoleon said from in front of them. “We need you right where you are, Peril.”

“Right here?” Illya said. “Underground, in abandoned tunnel with  _attack dogs?_ No, thank you. I think I like it better back with arms dealers.”

“Too bad,” Gaby said. “Suck it up,” she added with vicious enunciation.

“Cowboy,” Illya growled.

“Calm down, Kuryakin. Developing new strategies is the best way to evolve as a team, and anyway, it’s all the history,” Napoleon said, “that really ties us together, don’t you think?”


End file.
